Category Archives: Strategy 2.0

What is Smarty?

Smarty is a template engine for PHP. More specifically, it facilitates a manageable way to separate application logic and content from its presentation. This is best described in a situation where the application programmer and the template designer play different roles, or in most cases they are not the same person.

Using Smarty with the Zend Framework

Every Enterprise 2.0 strategy should include a plan for the base code. Our base code should easily support our Web 2.0 needs on our Enterprise 2.0 platform. The Model View Controller structure of the Zend Framework automatically supports a built-in template system. The Framework is flexible enough to plug-in your custom template system or existing systems. Smarty is a very well documented and supported system. The strategy of using Smarty with Zend will provide a solid foundation for our Enterprise 2.0 platform. This is what we define as Strategy 2.0, leveraging the effort of crowds. Thanks to all the dedicated developers at Smarty for keeping our costs down and making our lives easier.

Move the library files to your standard location.Note: This is usually something like “/usr/local/lib/php”, but you may need to check your PHP Include Path to validate your standard location.mv Smarty-2.6.20/libs /usr/local/lib/php/Smarty

Delete the decompressed directory and all it’s contents.rm -rf Smarty-2.6.20

Amy Shuen has a firm grip on the long tail.Get your face in this book and don’t blink while she takes you on a fascinating journey to the tipping point fueled by the wisdom of crowds.My space on the shelf for this book is empty because her book is always in my hand.I bought several copies of her book as gifts for friends.

Amy Shuen is to the world of Web 2.0 as Ludwig van Beethoven’s influence is to the world of music.Her impact on web strategy is comparable to da Vinci’s impact on art.She is ahead of her time.Get her book before the ground swell from tribes of new influencers leaves you in a wikinomic downturn.

I have been in the web business since the early 90s.I am a professional technology consultant and thought leader.I have a huge collection of books, papers, & resources related to my industry and Amy’s book is my most prized possession. I recommend getting extra copies for you and your colleagues.

One snippet from this book clearly explains how a small strategy adjustment saved a tremendous amount of money for a well known company.Depending on your reach, this tiny snippet can help save you $1,000’s – $1,000,000’s.I would spend far more than the price of this whole book for this one snippet.

One last flckr of thought.What if your competition already has this book?

XFN (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a ‘rel’ attribute to their <a href> tags, e.g.:

XFN PLUGINS FOR WORDPRESS

There are a few XFN – XHTML Friends Network plugins already created for WordPress.You can find XFN plugins by searching Google for “WordPress plugin xfn” or you can see a list of the stored plugins at WordPress here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=xfn

Here’s a couple of my favorite FXN plug-ins for WordPress.

Blogroll Links

For people who maintain their Web site or blog using the WordPress blog content management system, blogroll-links is an open source WordPress plugin that uses WordPress built-in Blogroll feature and presents links to friends’ home pages and own pages on social networking sites using XFN in the links.

Features of this plugin

It can show the links by category in blog posts and WordPress Pages.

It uses WordPress standard built-in Blogroll links database. There is no hassle of another list of links to maintain.

It can be used to show only the links assigned to a particular category, by stating the category slug as defined in that category’s setting in WordPress.

It honors the Show/Hidden setting as defined for each link in WordPress.

It displays the link in the same window or new window, as specified for each link in WordPress.

XFN Icons

Adds Icons after links according to whether you’ve specified XFN or not. XFN (XHTML Friends Network) is a way of adding properties to links to specify relationships between the two sites, or the two subjects of the sites. WordPress supports them by default, and you can add them by looking further down the page on the “Add Links” Page in the Admin Area.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project

FOAF is about your place in the Web, and the Web’s place in our world. FOAF is a simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online.

The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

Google’s Social Graph API

The public web is made up of linked pages that represent both documents and people. Google Search helps make this information more accessible and useful. If you take away the documents, you’re left with the connections between people. Information about the public connections between people is really useful — as a user, you might want to see who else you’re connected to, and as a developer of social applications, you can provide better features for your users if you know who their public friends are. There hasn’t been a good way to access this information. The Social Graph API now makes information about the public connections between people on the Web, expressed by XFN and FOAF markup and other publicly declared connections, easily available and useful for developers.

When I installed WordPress, I had nothing else on my server, but I wanted to reserve the root space for additional components, so I installed WordPress in a subdirectory named “blog”. Now I want all requests from my domain to just return the default view of my WordPress blog.

You can easily control this with an htaccess file in your root directory. Simply add the following line to your .htaccess file.

We can always go back and change this after we add new components and update the main index page.

This approach to the architecture will allow us to install other components and connect them in our root space. Let’s say we wanted to add a forum to the site. We could install the forum software in the /forums directory, then update the root space to show information about our blog and forums without disturbing the architecture of either component. This approach will allow us to easily integrate components at will and give us the ability to update the component through their natural interface.